Business profile: An Outsider with fresh eyes

Top lawyer Anthony Salz is moving after 30 years to corporate banking. Katherine Griffiths hears about his career and hopes

Anthony Salz, the star corporate lawyer who was until March senior partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, has just ended his 30-year career in the legal field to become an investment banker. After a battle for his services from several investment banks, Salz plumped for NM Rothschild.

The very English 56-year-old has worked on some of Britain's most high-profile deals and his contacts book is said by people who know him to be one of the best in the City. He is also vice-chairman of the BBC until the end of the year.

He also masterminded Freshfields' transformation into a heavyweight legal firm on the Continent with the acquisition in 2000 of one of Germany's top corporate law firms, Bruckhaus Westrick Heller Loeber.

He says he is not sure how the new job will go. "I don't know which of the relationships I've had in the past will use me in an investment banking context," he admits.

But he is enthusiastic about his change of career. "Lawyers are very time-focused. I'm getting away from that. I feel at this stage and this level of seniority - maybe I mean age - there is an opportunity to spend more time thinking about individual clients and their ambitions and worries than thinking about the legal aspects of a particular project which they have already identified."

Salz, who will become an "executive vice-chairman" at Rothschild, does not see himself as "a banker hustling business by coming up with an idea that no one else has come up with", but rather as a "sounding board". But he adds he will "have to show some value to Rothschild".

It has been widely reported that Salz might have gone to Cazenove, where his long-time friend and business associate, David Mayhew, is chairman. He says the fit was better with Rothschild, which is deeply rooted in Europe and remains an independent advice-only firm.

In contrast, Cazenove tied its fortunes to the giant American investment bank JP Morgan last year through a joint venture.

Salz says: "David wants to hang on to some of the strong parts of Cazenove and its relationships, and brand. I think he has done very well at that. A more complicated thing, as an outsider going into a place with Cazenove's history, is the change that is occurring and will continue to occur as Caz tries to develop its investment banking relationships and does so in conjunction with JP Morgan."

Salz says he and Mayhew have "done an awful lot of work together for mutual clients and over the years it has been a lot of fun."

One situation which turned out to be very unfunny, however, was Guinness, whose hostile takeover of Distillers in 1986 resulted in one of the City's biggest scandals. Ernest Saunders, Guinness's chief executive, was convicted of illegally ramping its share price and he, together with two other directors, went to prison.

Mayhew was implicated but the Serious Fraud Office subsequently dropped all charges against him. Salz was a prosecution witness but spent much of his time answering questions from the defence.

"I had to give evidence for far too long. In part, in my view, because they wanted me to help explain the intricacies of a long and hard-fought competitive takeover. You might even cynically say the defence wanted me to show how complicated it was, to make it more difficult for the jury to understand, or just to wear them down."

The effect of Guinness was to make Salz more careful about his clients. "One of the great things about my career has been feeling part of a team to achieve an objective. That was the one instance where, after the event, it was clear you were not really being treated as part of a team. It caused me to wonder about how easily you trust people. I needed to be a bit more cynical."

Speaking in his quiet, clipped voice, Salz likens the experience of the Guinness case to a gruelling mountain climb he undertook recently with his wife in Bhutan. "We forced ourselves up a mountain at altitude and it was extremely hard. I wondered why the hell on holiday we were pushing ourselves through degrees of pain."

But he adds of Guinness: "It was a fascinating experience and, oddly, I don't actually regret it. But at the end of the day I would still have done the climb. I wouldn't have chosen to do Guinness."

Salz, who was born in Tavistock, Devon, went to Exeter University having disregarded advice from Oxford that if he stayed at school another year it would probably have taken him. His career started at the law firm Kenneth Brown Baker Baker. He stayed for two years after qualifying and then became restless. "I was impatient and demanding, and I wanted to be made partner but they wanted me to wait."

He applied for three jobs and went to Freshfields. "I was told by Coward Chance at my first interview I should go and have my hair cut. I came back a few weeks later having had my hair cut rather short and they said, 'I don't believe you've had your hair cut, go away'," he recalls.

Salz quicky rose through the ranks at Freshfields, becoming senior partner in 1996. Some of the deals he has under his belt include the mergers of SmithKline and Beecham and Reed International with Elsevier of the Netherlands.

Of the publishing giant Reed Elsevier which was created, Salz says: "A dual holding company structure had not been done for many years. It was a cleverly structured deal to achieve a business objective. Some of the integration aspects did not work as well as had been hoped and it took a while to sort out. Bu several years later, with more clear governance, it has fulfilled its potential."

Working with clients is Salz's first love and he was less keen on the administration and other matters which filled his time. That is partly why other partners at Freshfields agreed to Salz taking on the role as vice-chairman of the BBC in 2004.

As well as giving advice on legal issues and corporate governance, Salz chairs the BBC remuneration committee. "You very conscious that you are responsible for the licence fee. It is a difficult problem because you are in a very competitive media space, but also trying to do the right thing by the licence fee payers."

He rejects the idea that the BBC was cowed by its vicious run-in with Downing Street over its story that its dossier on the reasons for the Iraq war were "sexed up". He points out that the BBC has subjected itself to a study of its impartiality on Europe and the Middle East "which has been quite testing".

While at Freshfields, Salz spent a considerable amount of time working with a charity which sets up placements in companies for homeless people and another linking business leaders with those doing jobs in the public sector, such as teachers in tough areas. He says of the teachers he worked with that in many ways all they needed was to talk to an outsider coming at a problem with fresh eyes. He hopes to offer a similar service to the clients of Rothschild.